Quick Specs

Editors' Review

Pandora is a music discovery and recommendation service that creates custom stations based on artists or individual songs. The service is powered by the Music Genome Project, a taxonomy of musical information by a team of musicians an audio analysts who have gone through a massive database of songs and categorized them based on more than 400 characteristics (among them harmony, instrumentation, and rhythm). Once you input a song, Pandora spits back a continuously-running playlist of music with similar characteristics.

Pandora is an extremely simple and easy-to-use site that requires very little information from you to sign up. The service consists of a centrally located jukebox that contains a list of previously-created stations on the left-hand side for easy access. Or you can click the Create a New Station button on the top to input a new song or artist. During playback, you have a variety of options. You can pause playback and skip tracks, as well as click thumbs up or thumbs down for the songs you do or don't like, respectively. There's also a menu button for each track that lets you move it to another station, find out why it was selected, bookmark it, or buy it from iTunes or Amazon MP3. With enough use, it can effectively introduce you to all sorts of new music, and users can really tailor radio stations based on personal tastes.

The service makes its money from advertisements that are inserted every few songs, similar to terrestrial radio stations. As with all free Internet radio services, you are subjected to skip limits during playback. However, there's a subscription option that removes the skip limits and ads, and lets users relisten to songs from the playlists. In addition the Web, Pandora is available on a variety of mobile devices, such as the iPhone, as well as home network music players, such as the Sonos. All in all, Pandora is great way to discover new tunes or just pass the time with some background music, whether you stick to the Web version, take it on the go on your phone, or pump it out to some speakers.

read more +

Publisher's Description

Pandora brings the power of the Music Genome Project to everyone. It plays music you'll love--and nothing else. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings--new and old, well known and completely obscure--to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.You can create as many "stations" as you want. And you can even refine them. If it's not quite right you can tell it so and it will get better for you. The Music Genome Project was founded by musicians and music-lovers. We believe in the value of music and have a profound respect for those who create it.

Good layout & variety. Easy to use. OpenPandora makes it even better by not requiring you to have a browser open all the time. Easier to use than LastFM imo. Plus, I've found more new artists/songs on here than anywhere else.

Cons

You can "Thumbs down" yourself into oblivion and end up with just a few songs repeated over and over on some stations if you don't add content.

Summary

I've started using this both at work and at home. I wish someone would get a good Linux prog going to use it at home like OpenPandora that I use at work on my Windows machine. I'm usually listening to one of my stations 12+ hours a day. Now if the greedy record labels will lay off, maybe there's hope for more groups like this. I've bought more CDs as a result of hearing new music on Pandora than I have in the past 2 years

The CNet review made this sound like the best thing since sliced bread and maybe it is. Unfortunately someone at Cnet forgot that there is a life outside of the US and therefore didn't mention that this app is only available in the US. Not much use to anyone in the UK, Europe or the rest of the world. Would have been nice if this was made clear in the Download Dispatch

E-mail This Review

Thank You, !

Report Offensive Content

If you believe this comment is offensive or violates the CNET's Site Terms of Use, you can report it below (this will not automatically remove the comment). Once reported, our staff will be notified and the comment will be reviewed.